Description:

I had come to the institute’s Bioengineering Division as an East Asian Pacific Summer Institute summer fellow, having come from Rutgers University in New Jersey where I’m a Ph.D. student and fellow of NSF’s Integratively Engineered Biointerfaces program. I had received cutting-edge instruction for the culturing of cells, but my experience was limited to very hardy cell lines from epithelial tissues (surface cells), and my approach to cultures was more engineering than biomedical.

However, in Taiwan my mentors were all biologists, and would only mentor me as a student of biology. They were very forgiving of my utter lack of Chinese language skills, but they were much more insistent that I speak biolog-ese. But the work was everything that I had been trained to do at the university: to be able to interface with the researchers in the basic sciences, and to synthesize the experience within the universe of biomedical engineering.